Central Ohio artist Mark Gingerich has a profound interest in, and mastery of, plein-air
painting, as demonstrated in the exhibit “An Impressionists’s Eye” at Brandt-Roberts Galleries. The
30 or so oil and watercolor paintings capture images from Italy and rural Ohio, transporting
viewers to each idyllic landscape.

Characterized by loose, high-energy brushwork, impressionist painting unravels into individual
brushstrokes when looked at closely, then comes together as a cohesive image from a few steps back.
Like the 19th-century French impressionists, Gingerich is less concerned with mimicking the actual
landscape than in capturing its effects.

The subject of
Autumn in Ohio is a bucolic landscape in which a farmhouse reveals itself in a few dabs of
paint. A frieze of trees in the mid-ground of the painting is the only stabilizing force, but even
the trees seem to sway in the wind. The brushstrokes are thick and tactile; it looks as though the
artist has applied them with a palette knife. The image slips away as the viewer moves closer to
the canvas.

Most of the paintings in the exhibit are hung salon-style, creating dialogue from canvas to
canvas.

A quick oil study of a mother reading to her child is placed under a night scene from the Piazzo
Navona in Rome. Nearby, a watercolor study of the Grand Canal in Venice sits under a small oil
landscape from near Athens, Ohio.

Gingerich’s endless interest in light becomes mesmerizing. His Italian land- and cityscapes
transport viewers to a bustling Venice. With a few dabs of yellow and white paint, light glimmers
off the Grand Canal.
Dusk on the Canal captures an Italian cafe at nightfall, where the streetlights sparkle in
the inky water.

Viewers can imagine themselves as one of the anonymous figures pictured in the glow of the cafe
light.

Gingrich makes it easy to imagine yourself in almost any of his paintings.